Historical Empathy and Perspective Taking in the Social Studies

Making the historical past come alive for students is a goal of most social studies teachers. Many youth find the people and events and movements portrayed in their textbooks to be wooden, remote, and empty. For history to become alive to them, students seek personal meanings as they use knowledge of context and ponder details. Currently most school history programs emphasize knowledge acquisition at the expense of these personal constructions of meaning. This new collection of essays provides practical assistance in the search for a more robust teaching of history and the social studies. Contributors to this volume offer insights from the discipline of history about the nature of empathy and the necessity of examining perspectives on the past. On the basis of recent classroom research, they suggest tested guides to more robust teaching. They also employ examples from classroom practice about how teachers can facilitate students' consideration of multiple and sometimes conflicting perspectives when seeking historical meanings. The contributors insist that with experienced history and social studies teachers, students can learn many historical details and, with the use of empathy, develop deepened and textured interpretations of the history that they study.